The present invention relates generally to communication systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods that quickly and accurately evaluate the performance of a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) based wireless network.
The cellular telephone industry has made phenomenal strides in commercial operations in the United States as well as the rest of the world. Growth in major metropolitan areas has far exceeded expectations and is rapidly outstripping system capacity. If this trend continues, the effects of this industry""s growth will soon reach even the smallest markets. Innovative solutions are required to meet these increasing capacity needs as well as maintain high quality service and avoid rising prices.
In addition to the challenges posed by the need for greater system capacity, the designers of future wireless communication systems have their own unique set of challenges. For example, in order to engineer efficient wireless systems, designers need to be able to quickly evaluate the performance of the proposed wireless communication system while still maintaining accuracy.
A formal network analysis of a cellular installation is a computation-intensive, as well as time-consuming, process. Today, analysis of wireless system performance involves running full-scale simulations. These simulations, due to their complexity and accuracy, generally take several hours or days to get results. Therefore, if the system designer has no prior knowledge that the planned network will meet at least a minimum standard of performance, he or she can waste a lot of time waiting for and analyzing plans that will not work.
As a result, there exists a need for systems and methods that allow for a quick, yet accurate, evaluation of network performance prior to having to run full-scale simulations of the network under consideration.
Systems and methods consistent with the present invention address this need by providing a mechanism that quickly and accurately evaluates the performance of a communication network.
A method consistent with the present invention includes determining probable servers for every location in the communication network; determining the traffic load of each sector of the base stations in the network; determining a cell site transmit power; determining a total interference; determining analog hand-down traffic; generating a traffic map; re-computing the sector load, the cell site transmit power, and the total interference; and estimating the performance of the communication network using the re-computed sector load, cell site transmit power, and total interference.
In another implementation consistent with the present invention, a method includes determining pilot strength and interference at each location in the communication network, determining pilot strength to interference ratios at each location, and determining the performance of the network based on the determined ratios.